I’ve been running PMS now for many years and just bought a 4K TV and 4K Apple TV. When I watch 4K content via the 4K Apple TV it streams just fine, however I also have another TV in my house that has a 1080 Apple TV (so not the 4K variety) and the 4K content will NOT stream on that device.
I’m assume it is because it has to transcode the 4K stream down to 1080, or something like that?
My PMS is running on Ubuntu 20.04.3. I have a 4TB Sata HDD that holds the media library content, and a 250GB SSD that is used for my Transcode folder.
What can I look at, or change to make it so I can stream 4K content to my 1080p Apple TV?
This doesn’t really say anything about the transcoding capability of your system. What are the specs of the system? CPU, GPU, etc. Also I see you have a Plex Pass, if you have hardware capable of it, hardware accelerated transcoding is a must.
Intel(R) Core™ i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz
Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3
2 x 8GiB DIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1333 MHz
I just ran a 4K stream transcoding to 1080P and my CPU just maxed out instantly. So I guess that’s the bottleneck?
Would replacing the 1080P Apple TV with a 4K Apple TV (even though it’s connected to a 1080p TV) help with the transcoding, or would the PMS still need to transcode 4K content?
The problem is with your CPU. Intel chips prior to 6th gen if I remember correct do not support HEVC decoding which is necessary for 4K. On top of that 2nd and 3rd gen Core processors have infamously bad implementations of Quicksync. So you kind of have 2 options, upgrade the server hardware to a more capable CPU, or upgrade your clients so you never have to transcode.
That makes sense! I think it’s time to upgrade the server hardware!! Here’s another question - what if I want to stream 4K content to 2 Apple TV’s at the same time? If I’m not transcoding, then that won’t be an issue right? It’s just whenever transcoding happens that the CPU is taxed!
If you are not transcoding a reasonable CPU can handle a ton of streams. My lowly NAS can definitely handle at least 10 streams if there is no transcoding and it has a Celeron J4125 in it (that is the most plays I have ever had going at once, I think it could handle a lot more). So as long as you aren’t demanding that it transcodes you should be fine. That little guy can also handle 2 4K transcodes and probably 4-5 1080p transcodes. I think I have heard that 10th Gen is better right now because 11th gen they are having some issues with the drivers for the integrated graphics (you might want to do some research into that). I also wouldn’t purchase a K SKU unless you need the overclocking for some other reason. I would say something like the 10400 or 11400 would be plenty if the machine is just a Plex server.
On Linux, your support (righ now anyway) is the -10xxx series. The 11’s (RocketLake) require a fair amount of support added to Plex.
AFAIK, it’s in the works BUT, if you want it now, the 10K is better and you will still be hard pressed to run out of GPU. You’ll run out of CPU for audio on an i5 first.
Brilliant - thanks guys - I’ll definitely go with a 10 series then! My PMS hardware is old - so time to upgrade especially since I want to run 4K streams and transcoding.
I have an i7-7700 and a couple i7-8809G (NUC 8) machines.
The i7-7700 can HW transcode 6 HIGH bitrate streams without running out of bandwidth in the ASIC and do tone mapping.
I only run out of CPU for the audio but I took care of that by purchasing the Nvidia Shield Pro 2019. PMS sends the video DirectPlay. The Shield does ALL the work… transcoding , subtitles, everything.
Brilliant - final question - I’ll need to get some DDR4 RAM because my current set up is DDR3. How much RAM is enough for a home system? 16GB do the trick?
Do NOT get an F sku, they do not have integrated graphics which you need for hardware based Quicksync transcoding, and yes you’ll need to get DDR4 memory. 16GB should be more then enough.
Bugger - okay no F sku! So Intel Core i7-10700F is out! Ok let me find another one that’s reasonably priced and I’ll send it through for you to check out!
I would say the i7-10700 non F or K, i5-10600 non F or K, i5-10400 non F all are great CPU’s for what you want. If you plan to use the machine for something other then Plex, gaming, production, game server hosting, etc. Then it may be worth it to invest in the higher end chips. Otherwise a 10th gen i5 should slaughter anything a Plex server could throw at it.
FYI I can do 4x high bitrate 4k HDR → 1080P SDR transcode + tone mapping streams on an i3-7100. I also made ramdisk the transcoder temp directory, and still had plenty of RAM left on an 8 GB system.
While it would be nice to have more and faster cores, and more RAM… with Quick Sync support you can get away with murder.
@stevodevo if you live near a Microcenter they have an outrageous CPU deal right now, an i7-9700k for $150.
Ok got one more question - when I get my new hardware, am I okay to just move the hard drive with Ubuntu over to the new hardware so that I don’t have to reinstall everything? Will Plex work out that I’ve got a CPU capable of running hardware encoding automatically? Or should I just do a fresh build and start all over again?
